Asiatics' Home, and from there we wandered to High Street, Poplar, to
the house of a gracious gentleman from Pi-chi-li, not for opium but for
a chat with him. For my companions had not smoked before, and I did not
want two helpless invalids on my hands at midnight. Those amazingly
thrilling and amazingly ludicrous stories of East End opium-rooms are
mainly, I may say, the work of journalistic specials. A journalistic
special is a man who writes thrillingly on old-fashioned topics on which
he is ill-informed. The moment he knows something about his subject he
is not allowed to write; he ceases to be a special. Also, of course, if
a man, on sociological investigation, puts an initial pipe of opium on
top of a brandy or so--well, one can understand that even the interior
of the Bayswater omnibus may be a haunt of terror and wonder. Taking a
jolt of "chandu" in a Limehouse room is about as exciting as taking a
mixed vermuth at the Leicester Lounge.
The gracious gentleman received us affably. Through a curtained recess
was the small common room, where yellow and black men reclined, in a
purple dusk, beaded with the lights of little lamps. The odour was
sickly, the air dry. The gentleman wondered whether we would have a
room. No, we wouldn't; but I bought cigarettes, and we went upstairs to
the little dirty bedrooms. The bed is but a mattress with a pillow.
There, if you are a dope-fiend, you may have your pipe and lamp, very
cosy, and you may lock the door, and the room is yours until you have
finished. One has read, in periodicals, of the well-to-do people from
the western end, who hire rooms here and come down, from time to time,
for an orgy. That is another story for the nursery. White people do
visit the rooms, of course, but they are chiefly the white seamen of the
locality; and, in case you may ever feel tempted to visit any of the
establishments displaying the Sign of the Open Lamp, I may tell you that
your first experiment will result in violent nausea, something akin to
the effect of the cigar you smoked when you were twelve, but heightened
to the _n_th power. Opium does nasty things to the yellow man; it does
nastier things to the white man. Not only does it wreck the body, but it
engenders and inflames those curious vices to which allusion has been
made elsewhere. If you do not believe me, then you may accept the wisdom
of an unknown Formosan, who, three hundred years ago, published a tract,
telling of the effects of the Open Lamp on the white man. They are, in a
word, parallel with the effects of whisky on the Asiatic. Listen:--
The opium is boiled in a copper pan. The pipe is in appearance like
a short club. Depraved young men, without any fixed occupation,
meet together by night and smoke; and it soon becomes a habit.
Fruit and sweetmeats are provided for the sailors, and no charge
is made for the first time, in order to tempt them. After a while
they cannot stay away, and will forfeit all their property so as to
buy the drug. Soon they find themselves beyond cure. If they omit
smoking for a day, their faces become shrivelled, their lips stand
open, and they seem ready to die. Another smoke restores vitality,
but in three years they all die.
So now you know. The philanthropic foreigner published his warning in
1622. In 1915 ... well, walk down Pennyfields and exercise your nose,
and calculate how much opium is being smoked in London to-day.
Nobody troubles very much about Chinatown, except the authorities, and
their interference is but perfunctory. The yellow men, after all, are,
as Prologue to "Pagliacci" observes, but men like you, for joy or
sorrow, the same broad heaven above them, the same wide world before
them. They are but men like you, though the sanitary officials may doubt
it. They _will_ sleep six and seven in one dirty bed, and no law of
London can change their ways. Anyway, they are peaceful, agreeable
people, who ask nothing but to be allowed to go about their business and
to be happy in their own way. They are shy birds, and detest being
looked at, or talked to, or photographed, or written about. They don't
want white men in their restaurants, or nosing about their places. They
carry this love of secrecy to strange lengths. Not so long ago a press
photographer set out boldly to get pictures of Chinatown. He marched to
the mouth of Limehouse Causeway, through which, in the customary light
of grey and rose, many amiable creatures were gliding, levelled his nice
new Kodak, and got--an excellent picture of the Causeway after the
earthquake. The entire street in his plate was deserted.
Certain impressionable people--Cook's tourists and Civil
Servants--return from the East mumbling vague catchwords--mystic,
elusive, subtle, haunting, alluring. These London Chinese are neither
subtle nor mystic. They are mostly materialist and straightforward; and,
once you can gain their confidence, you will find yourself wonderfully
at home. But it has to be gained, for, as I have said, they are shy, and
were you to try to join a game of cards on a short acquaintance ...
well, it would be easier to drop in for a cigarette with King George. To
get into a Grosvenor Square mansion on a ball night is a comparatively
easy matter: swank and an evening suit will do it; nothing very
exclusive about those people. But the people of Limehouse, and, indeed,
of any slum or foreign quarter, are exclusive; and to get into a Poplar
dope-house on bargain night demands the exercise of more Oriental
ingenuity than most of us possess.
Only at the mid-January festival do they forget themselves and come out
of their shells. Then things happen. The West India Dock Road is whipped
to life. The windows shake with flowers, the roofs with flags. Lanterns
are looped from house to house, and the slow frenzy of Oriental carnival
begins. In the morning there is solemn procession, with joss-sticks, to
the cemetery, where prayers are held over the graves of departed
compatriots, and lamentations are carried out in native fashion, with
sweet cakes, whisky, and song and gesture. In the evening--ah!--dancing
in the halls with the white girls. Glamorous January evening ... yellow
men with much money to spend ... beribboned girls, gay, flaunting, and
fond of curious kisses ... lighted lanterns swinging lithely on their
strings ... noise, bustle, and laughter of the cafes ... all these
things light this little bit of London with an alluring Eastern flame.
There was a time, years ago, when the East End was the East End--a land
apart, with laws and customs of its own, cut off from civilization, and
having no common ground with Piccadilly. But the motor-'bus has changed
all that. It has so linked things and places that all individual
character has been swamped in a universal chaos, and there is now
neither East nor West. All lost nooks of London have been dug out and
forced into the traffic line, and boundaries are things which exist
to-day only in the mind of the borough councillor. Hyde Park stretches
to Shadwell, Hampstead to Albert Docks. Soho is _vieux jeu_. Little
Italy is exploded. The Russian and Jewish quarters are growing stale and
commercial, and the London Docks are a region whose chief features are
Cockney warehouse clerks. This corner of Limehouse alone remains
defiantly its Oriental self, no part of London; and I trust that it may
never become popular, for then there will be no spot to which one may
escape from the banalities of the daily day.
But as we stood in the little bedroom of the gentleman from Pi-chi-li
the clock above Millwall Docks shot twelve crashing notes along the
night. The gentleman thrust a moon face through the dusky doorway to
inquire if I had changed my mind. Would myself and honourable companions
smoke, after all? We declined, but he assured me that we should meet
again at Tai-Ling's cafe, and perhaps hospitality....
So we tumbled down the crazy stairs, through the room from which the
Chinks were fast melting, and into the midnight glitter of the endless
East India Dock Road. We passed through streets of dark melancholy,
through labyrinthine passages where the gas-jets spluttered
asthmatically, under weeping railway arches, and at last were free of
the quarter where the cold fatalism of the East combats the wistful
dubiety of the West. But the atmosphere, physical and moral, remained
with us. Not that the yellow men are to blame for this atmosphere. The
evil of the place is rather that of Londoners, and the bitter nightmare
spirit of the place is rather of them than of Asia. I said that there
was little wickedness in Chinatown, but one wickedness there is, which
is never spoken of in published articles; opium seems the only point
that strangers can fasten on. Even if this wickedness were known, I
doubt if it would be mentioned. It concerns.... But I had better not.
We looked back at Barking Road, where it dips and rises with a sweep as
lovely as a flying bird's, and on the bashful little streets, whose
lights chime on the darkness like the rounding of a verse. Strange
streets they are, where beauty is unknown and love but a grisly phantom;
streets peopled, at this hour, with loose-lipped and uncomely
girls--mostly the fruit of a yellow-and-white union--and with other
things not good to be talked of. I was philosophizing to my friend about
these things, and he was rhapsodizing to me about the stretch of
lamplights, when a late 'bus for the Bank swept along. We took a flying
mount that shook the reek of Limehouse from our clothes and its
nastiness from our minds, and twenty minutes later we were taking a
final coffee at the "Monico."
A DOMESTIC NIGHT
CLAPHAM COMMON
_THE LAMPLIT HOUR_
_Dusk--and the lights of home
Smile through the rain:
A thousand smiles for those that come
Homeward again._
_What though the night be drear
With gloom and cold,
So that there be one voice to hear,
One hand to hold?_
_Here, by the winter fire,
Life is our own.
Here, out of murk and mire,
Here is our throne._
_Then let the wild world throng
To pomp and power;
And let us fill with love and song
The lamplit hour._
A DOMESTIC NIGHT
CLAPHAM COMMON
At six o'clock every evening London Bridge vomits its stream of tired
workers, hurrying home, most of them living at Clapham Common or similar
places with a different name. Some of them walk home along those
straggling streets which, after many years, reach the near suburbs; some
of them go by car or 'bus. All are weary. All are gay. They are Going
Home.
I think it was Mr. Mark Sheridan who was singing, some few years back,
that "All the girls are lover-ly by the seaside!" I do not know the poet
responsible for this sentiment, but I should like to take him to any of
the London bridges and let him watch the crowd coming home at six
o'clock. He was all wrong, anyway. The girls are not lovely by the
seaside. If there is one place where the sweetest girl is decidedly
plain and ill-kempt it is at the seaside. His song should read, "All the
girls are lover-ly up in London!" And they are, whether they be
chorus-girls, typists, shop-girls, Reuter's messenger-girls, modistes,
or factory girls. Do you know those delightful London children, the
tailors' collectors, who "fetch it and bring it home"? Their job is to
take out the work from the big tailoring establishments to the dozens
and dozens of home workers, and to collect it from them at the appointed
time. You may easily recognize them by the large black-lining bundles
which they carry so deftly under either arm. Mostly they are dear little
girls of about fourteen, in short frocks, and mostly they are pretty.
They have a casual manner, and they smile very winningly. Often their
little feet tramp twelve and fourteen miles a day delivering and
collecting; often they are sworn at by the foreman for being late; often
they are very unhappy, and hardly ever do they get more than
seven-and-sixpence a week. But they always smile: a little timidly, you
know, because they are so young and London is so full of perils; yea,
though they work harder than any other sweated labourer--they smile.
And over the bridges they come at nightfall, if they are not doing
overtime, chattering and smiling, each with a Dorothy-bag, or imitation
leather dispatch-case, each with a paper novelette, and so to the clear
spaces of Clapham Common, now glittering with the lights of home, and
holding in its midst a precious jewel--the sparkled windows of the
Windmill Inn.
At home, tea is ready set for them and their brothers. Brothers are
probably in warehouses or offices, somewhere in the brutal City; for
every member of the suburban family earns something; they all contribute
their little bit to help "keep the home going." Tea is set in the
kitchen, or living-room, and Mother sits there by the fire, awaiting the
return of her brood, and reading, for the forty-fourth time, _East
Lynne_. Acacia Grove is a narrow street of small houses, but each house
is pridefully held by its owners, and fierce competition, in the matter
of front gardens, is waged during spring and summer. Now it is a
regiment of soft lights, each carrying its message of cheer and promises
of tea, armchair, and slippered ease. The fragrance of the meal is
already on the air, and through the darling twilight comes the
muffin-man and the cheery tinkle of his bell--one of the last of a once
great army of itinerant feeders of London. Gaslight and firelight leap
on the spread table, glinting against cups and saucers and spoons, and
lighting, with sudden spurts, the outer gloom. A sweet warmth fills the
room--the restful homeliness imparted by a careful, but not too careful,
woman. The wallpaper is flaring, but very clean. The pictures are
flaring, but framed with honest love. The dresser holds, not only
crockery but also items of decoration: some carved candlesticks, some
photographs in gilt frames, an ornament with a nodding head, kept there
because it always amuses young Emmie's baby when she calls. Everywhere
pride of home is apparent....
When the lady hears a familiar step, she lays _East Lynne_ aside, pokes
up the fire, places a plate in the fender, and a kipper over the
griddle, where it sizzles merrily; for it is wasteful to use the gas
grill when you have a fire going. Then the boys come clumping in, or the
girls come tripping in, and Mother attends them while she listens to
recitals of the days doings in the City. Sometimes the youngsters are
allowed to postpone their tea until the big ones come home; and then
they take a Scramble Tea on the rug before the fire. You take a Scramble
Tea by turning saucers and plates upside down, and placing the butter in
the sugar-basin, the sugar on the bread-board, and the bread, so far as
possible, in the sugar-basin, and the milk in the slop-basin. Taken in
this way, your food acquires a new and piquant flavour, and stimulates a
flagging appetite. Or they lounge against the table, and help themselves
to sly dips in the jam with the handle of a teaspoon, or make predatory
assaults on the sugar-basin.
After tea, the bright boys wash, clean their boots, and change into
their "second-best" attire, and stroll forth, either to a picture palace
or to the second house of the Balham Hippodrome; perchance, if the gods
be favourable, to an assignation on South Side Clapham Common; sometimes
to saunter, in company with others, up and down that parade until they
"click" with one of the "birds." The girls are out on much the same
programme. They, too, promenade until they "click" with some one, and
are escorted to picture palace or hall or chocolate shop. Usually, it is
a picture palace, for, in Acacia Grove, mothers are very strict as to
the hours at which their young daughters shall be in. Half-past ten is
the general rule, with an extension on certain auspicious occasions.
It is a great game, this "clicking"; with very nice rules. However
seasoned the player may be, there are always, in certain districts,
pitfalls for the unwary. The Clapham manner is sharply distinct from the
Blackheath manner, as the Kilburn manner is distinct from that of
Leyton. On Clapham Common, the monkeys' parade is South Side; and the
game is started by strolling from "The Plough" to Nightingale Lane. As
the boys pass the likely girls they glance, and, if not rebuffed, offer
wide smiles. But they do not stop. At the second meeting, however, they
smile again and touch hands in passing, or cry over the shoulder some
current witticism, as: "'Snice night, Ethel!" or "I should shay sho!"
And Ethel and Lucy will swing round, challengingly, with scraping feet,
and cry, "Oooh!" The boys linger at the corner, looking back, and the
girls, too, look back. Ethel asks Lucy, "Shall we?" and Lucy says,
"Oooh--I d'no," and by that time the boys have drawn level with them.
They say, "Isn't it cold?" or "Awf'ly warm 'sevening!" And then, "Where
you off to in such a hurry?"
"Who--me?"
"Yes--you. Saucy!"
"Ooh--I d'no!"
"Well--shall we stroll 'cross the Common?"
"I don' mind."
Then boys and girls move forward together for the bosky glades of the
Common. They have "clicked." They have "got off."
In the light evenings the children sometimes take Mother for a 'bus ride
to Kingston or Mitcham, or Uncle George may drop in and talk to them
about the garden. While the elders talk gardens, the kiddies play in the
passage at sliding down the banisters. Having regard to its value in
soothing the nerves and stimulating the liver, and to the fact that it
is an indoor pastime within the reach of high and low, I never
understand why banister-sliding has not become more popular. I should
imagine that it would be an uproariously successful innovation at any
smart country house, during the long evenings, and the first hostess who
has the courage to introduce it will undoubtedly reap her reward....
There are, of course, other domesticities around Clapham Common on a
slightly higher scale; for there are roads and roads of uniform houses
at rents of L60 and L70 per annum, and here, too, sweetness and (pardon
the word) Englishness spread their lambent lustre.
Here they do not come home to tea; they come home to dinner. Dinner is
usually the simple affair that you get at Simpson's: a little soup
followed by a joint and vegetables, and a sweet of some sort. Beer is
usually drunk, though they do rise to wine on occasion. Here, too, they
have a real dining-room, very small, but still ... a dining-room. They
keep a maid, trim and smiling. And after dinner you go into the
drawing-room. The drawing-room is a snug little concern, decorated in a
commonplace way, but usually a corner where you can be at ease. The
pictures are mostly of the culture of yesterday--Watts, Rossetti, a
Whistler or so; perhaps, courageously, a Monet reproduction. The
occasional tables bear slim volumes of slim verse, and a novel from
Mudie's. There is one of those ubiquitous fumed-oak bookcases. They go
in a little for statuettes, of a kind. There is no attempt at heavy
lavishness, nor is there any attempt at breaking away from tradition.
The piano is open. The music on the stand is "Little Grey Home in the
West"; it is smothering Tchaikowsky's "Chant sans Paroles." There are
several volumes of music--suspiciously new--Chopin's Nocturnes, Mozart's
Sonaten, Schubert's Songs.
After dinner, the children climb all over you, and upset your coffee,
and burn themselves on your cigarette. Then Mother asks the
rumple-haired baby, eight years old, to recite to the guest, and she
declines. So Mother goes to the piano, and insists that she shall sing.
To this she consents, so long as she may turn her back on her audience.
So she stands, her little legs looking so pathetic in socks, by her
mother, and sings, very prettily, "Sweet and Low" and that delicate
thing of Thomas Dekker's--"Golden Slumbers"--with its lovely
seventeenth-century melody, full of the graceful sad-gaiety of past
things, and of a pathos the more piercing because at first unsuspected;
beauty and sorrow crystallized in a few simple chords.
Then baby goes in care of the maid to bed, and Mother and Father and
Helen, who is twelve years old, go to the pictures at the Palladium near
Balham Station. There, for sixpence, they have an entertainment which is
quite satisfying to their modest temperaments and one, withal, which is
quite suitable to Miss Twelve Years Old; for Father and Mother are
Proper People, and would not like to take their treasure to the sullying
atmosphere of even a suburban music-hall.
So they spend a couple of hours with the pictures, listening to an
orchestra of a piano, a violin, and a 'cello, which plays even
indifferent music really well. And they roar over the facial
extravagances of Ford Sterling and his friends Fatty and Mabel; they
applaud, and Miss Twelve Years Old secretly admires the airy adventures
of the debonair Max Linder--she thinks he is a dear, only she daren't
tell Mother and Father so, or they would be startled. And then there is
Mr. C. Chaplin--always there is Mr. C. Chaplin. Personally, I loathe the
cinematograph. It is, I think, the most tedious, the most banal form of
entertainment that was ever flung at a foolish public. The Punch and
Judy show is sweetness and light by comparison. It is the mechanical
nature of the affair that so depresses me. It may be clever; I have no
doubt it is. But I would rather see the worst music-hall show that was
ever put up than the best picture-play that was ever filmed. The
darkness, the silence, the buzz of the machine, and the insignificant
processions of shadows on a sheet are about the last thing I should ever
describe by the word Entertainment. I would as soon sit for two hours in
a Baptist Chapel. Still, Mr. C. Chaplin has made it endurable.
After the pictures, they go home, and Miss Twelve goes to bed, while
Mother and Father sit up awhile. Father has a nightcap, perhaps, and
Mother gives him a little music. She doesn't pretend to play, she will
tell her guests; she just amuses herself. Often they have a friend or
two in for dinner and a little music, or music and a little dinner. Or
sometimes they visit other friends in an exchange of hospitalities, or
book seats for a theatre, or for the Coliseum, and perhaps dine in town
at Gatti's or Maxim's, and feel very gay. Mother seizes the opportunity
to air her evening frock, and father dresses, too, and they have a taxi
to town and a taxi home.
Then, one by one, the lights in their Avenue disappear; the warm windows
close their tired eyes; and in the soft silence of the London night they
ascend, hand in hand, to their comfortable little bedroom; and it is all
very sweet and sacramental....
A LONELY NIGHT
KINGSLAND ROAD
_A LONELY NIGHT_
_In the tinted dayspring of a London alley,
Where the dappled moonlight cools the sunburnt lane,
Deep in the flare and the coloured noise of suburbs,
Long have I sought you in shade and shine and rain!
Through dusky byways, rent with dancing naphthas,
Through the trafficked highways, where streets and streets collide,
Through the evil twilight, the night's ghast silence,
Long have I wandered, and wondered where you hide._
_Young lip to young lip does another meet you?
Has a lonely traveller, when day was stark and long,
Toiling ever slower to the grey road's ending,
Reached a sudden summer of sun and flower and song?
Has he seen in you the world's one yearning,
All the season's message, all the heaven's play?
Has he read in you the riddle of our living?
Have you to another been the dark's one ray?_
_Well, if one has held you, and, holding you, beheld you
Shining down upon him like a single star;
If Love to Love leans, even as the June sky,
Laughing down to earth, leans strangely close and far;
Has he seen the moonlight mirrored in the bloomy,
Softly-breathing gloom of your dear dark hair;
And seeing it, has worshipped, and cried again for heaven?
Then am I joyful for a fire-kissed prayer!_
A LONELY NIGHT
KINGSLAND ROAD